Kale and Leek Quiche Recipe

A Recipe

It was really good. I inhaled it.

Kale and leek quiche.

The other day when I was craving some dark leafies and bought all that kale, this is the first thing I made. I am a huge quiche fan. Do you know how hard it is to find a good vegetarian quiche recipe? I wanted a reliable recipe that I could use as a sort of quiche template- how many eggs and how much milk will I use each time? I have been working on it for years. Obviously, how much egg and milk you will use depends on how much other crap you stuff into the pastry shell.

I have found that in most cases a quiche requires 6-7 eggs mixed with 1/2 cup milk. If I have put a lot of stuff in the pastry shell, or if the eggs I have are really large, I will usually only need six.

I was lucky that I had a spare already-rolled-out pastry shell floating around in my freezer. As soon as I saw it the words "fresh frozen" came to mind, which reminded me of the conversation my mom and I had at the Golden Valley Brewery with a waitress. My mom was interested in ordering a berry cobbler so she asked if the berries were fresh. The waitress answered uncomfortably that they were "fresh frozen". When my mom said "So, the cobbler is made from frozen berries." The waitress defended the berries "Yes, but they were fresh when they were frozen."

Which is a lot like saying "She was alive when she died."

(This has reminded me of a thought that startled me right as I was about to turn left off of Baker street yesterday:

I really do feel like a coconut.

As though I was in the middle of a conversation with someone in which I am trying to convince their unbelieving ears of this fact. WTF?!)

Back to quiches. I am going to give you the recipe for the quiche I made the other day because there aren't enough vegetarian quiche recipes out there already. This one is really good.

You will need:

one rolled out pastry shell

6 eggs
1/2 cup milk
2 leeks
5 stalks of kale
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp of mustard powder blend (or prepared mustard will be fine too)
2 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp salt
pepper to taste


Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Finely slice the leeks and the kale. Heat up the two tablespoons of olive oil on medium high heat in a medium to large saute pan. Add the leeks first and saute until they start to soften. Add the kale and stir frequently. If the kale doesn't wilt and soften within the first two minutes, add a little smidgen of water to the pan and put the lid on for about one minute to steam the kale into submission. Then take off the burner.

Meanwhile, in a medium sized bowl: crack all of your eggs and whisk very thoroughly with the milk, the mustard, and the spices. I prefer to use a fork for this job but I won't judge you if you use an actual whisk.

Add the leek and kale mixture to the pie shell first and spread around evenly. Then slowly pour the egg and milk mixture over it. Pop it in the oven and cook for 40-45 minutes. I always check it when it's been about a half an hour because I've found that the cooking time for quiches are somewhat variable. Generally speaking, when your pie crust turns golden the eggs will have set.

Let cool and then eat the whole thing yourself.

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